Friday, July 19, 2013

A report by the ACLU entitled "You Are Being Tracked" examines the use
of license plate readers to track and record the movements of Americans.
This is a topic of particular interest given the revelations of Americans
spying on Americans (and just about everyone else).

License plate readers are becoming
ubiquitous in many nations including Canada and the United States. They are essentially a high speed camera that
is mounted on bridge overpasses, in police patrol cars and on posts along
streets and highways. These cameras capture an image of every passing
license plate along with the vehicle, driver and front seat passenger and are promoted as being used to locate vehicles (and presumably
their drivers) that are potentially guilty of a crime by checking the license plate
numbers against a police "hot list". They can also be used to track
stolen vehicles and track people that have been registered as sex offenders or for such mundane legal issues as parking tickets.
The use of these systems is becoming increasingly widespread; in 2011,
three-quarters of police agencies were using plate readers and it is estimated
that within five years, plate readers will be installed on one-quarter of all
police patrol cars.

Here
is a video showing how effective these systems are at capturing your license
plate numbers both at night and during the daytime:

For my Canadian readers, here is an
example of a mobile system that Canadian police in British Columbia are using,
even scanning all vehicles in shopping mall parking lots as they do a
drive-through:

The problems with the system is:

1.) The licence plate numbers of all
vehicles are recorded, not just those on the "hot list".

2.) The information is shared or
pooled with similar systems in other jurisdictions, building a massive database of information.

3.) The data gathered can be
retained permanently without restriction.

In case you wondered how this data
could be accumulated and used, here is a map showing where Minneapolis police
and traffic license plate readers found the city's Mayor's car between August
2011 and August 2012:

Minneapolis' eight mobile and two
stationary cameras captured 4.9 million license plate images in 2012 alone and
the city of St. Paul has an additional ten mobile cameras. In the case of
the city of Minneapolis, the scanned images are stored for 3 weeks.
Despite the potential for the invasion of privacy, here's what
Minneapolis Mayor Rybak had to say about the issue:

"In some cases, the license plate data the
police have retained have proven helpful in investigating and solving
crimes....but there are important, legitimate concerns around the length of
time it is stored and how it is or can be used or accessed that we need to
address."

Let's look briefly at
how much data is collected in three sample municipalities and how many hot list hits resulted:

Another example of
the overkill involved in license plate data gathering is found in Minnesota as a whole. Of the 1,691,031 plates
scanned between 2009 and 2011, the Minnesota State Patrol issued only 852
citations and made only 131 arrests. That is a measly 0.05 percent of all
plates read. Fortunately, Minnesota's policy is to delete all records
within 48 hours unless there are "extenuating circumstances".
The same cannot be said for other jurisdictions as shown on this chart:

Who is funding all of
these privacy-invading fun and games? The federal government, that's who!
Through grants from the Department of Homeland Security and the Department
of Justice, municipalities have received money that allow them to purchase
license plate recording equipment. Examples include New Castle County,
Delaware; they received a DoJ grant of $200,000 which was used to purchase a
system of eight license plate readers. As well, the Maryland Transportation Authority
Police used a $161,000 DoJ grant to purchase a system that included 14
license plate readers.

What is concerning
about this issue is the gathering of hundreds of millions of location and time
data points showing the travel histories of millions of motorists who have
committed no crime. This invasive tracking was covered in the United States v. Antoine Jones and Lawrence Maynard case
which addressed the issue of a police GPS tracking system. Here's what the
court had to say about that issue:

"”The fact of the matter is that
“[y]ou can preserve your anonymity from prying eyes, even in public, by
traveling at night, through heavy traffic, in crowds, by using a circuitous
route, disguising your appearance, passing in and out of buildings and
being careful not to be followed. But there’s no hiding from the all-seeing
network of GPS satellites that hover overhead, which never sleep, never blink,
never get confused and never lose attention....Maynard recognized that the warrantless use of GPS “turn[s] a
person into a broadcaster of his own affairs and travels, without his knowledge
or consent, for as long as the government may wish to use him where no warrant
places a limit on surveillance. To allow warrantless ...monitoring,
particularly under the standard urged by the government here (‘reasonable
suspicion’), would allow virtually limitless intrusion into the affairs of
private citizens.”. Nowhere does the
government tackle this critical concern.’

While the use of
police GPS tracking is one step further down the slippery slope of personal
invasion, license plate readers allow law enforcement and anyone else with
access to these systems (i.e. private contractors) to track virtually anyone including ex-husbands and
ex-wives, girlfriends and boyfriends (and former of both), friends and enemies,
neighbours, and co-workers and supervisors.

As in the case of
capturing our personal cell phone, email and internet data, authorities can
always justify the "slight" inconvenience of their intrusion into our
privacy by touting the crime (and/or terrorism) fighting benefits.
Unfortunately, that means that we have to trust that our data will not be
used for nefarious purposes. Basically, we are putting our personal lives
in the hands of the untrustworthy and that is frightening.

Let's close with a
quote from Bruce Schneier:

"Once the technology is in place, there will always be the temptation to
use it. And it is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday
facilitate a police state."

3 comments:

George Orwell had it wrong there will be no reason to have cameras and microphone is people’s houses. Drones flying overhead with arrays of various cameras can see what goes on in each household(think infrared). When a person decides to leave the house, cameras on every street corner watch while they walk. Get in a car for a drive, license plate readers located every few hundred feet track your car. (Even better is snap shot from progressive that really tracks what you do in your car). Buy something with a credit card that’s tracked, think your slick using cash to buy things well they know where you went pull up the stores surveillance system and they can check with the company’s inventory system to see what you purchased. Back at home send an email, make a phone call, surf the web, all tracked and possibly monitored. This would have been looked at as completely crazy talk but now it’s just about implemented. Maybe a few more years and this will be reality.

if you have a business of Import-Export then you must aware about the importance of Vehicle tracking for the reason that if your business involves transport of goods then security of the vehicle is very significant.

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About Me

I have been an avid follower of the world's political and economic scene since the great gold rush of 1979 - 1980 when it seemed that the world's economic system was on the verge of collapse. I am most concerned about the mounting level of government debt and the lack of political will to solve the problem. Actions need to be taken sooner rather than later when demographic issues will make solutions far more difficult. As a geoscientist, I am also concerned about the world's energy future; as we reach peak cheap oil, we need to find viable long-term solutions to what will ultimately become a supply-demand imbalance.